*<cite id=refAECH>United States Atomic Energy Commission, [http://ia700306.us.archive.org/34/items/unitedstatesatom007206mbp/unitedstatesatom007206mbp.pdf In the Matter of Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer] (Washington: United States Government Printing Office, 1954)</cite>

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*<cite id=refAECH>United States Atomic Energy Commission, [http://archive.org/details/unitedstatesatom007206mbp In the Matter of Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer] (Washington: United States Government Printing Office, 1954)</cite>

Early life

Oppenheimer was born in New York in 1904,[4] the eldest son of Julius and Ella (née Freedman) Oppenheimer. His father was a wealthy textile importer who had immigrated from Germany in 1895, his mother a scion of Philadelphia society who had studied painting in Paris.[5] They collected original art, including a Renoir and three Van Goghs; they also owned a 40-foot yacht,[6] and his father gave him his own 27-foot sloop.[7] Precocious but socially backward, Oppenheimer began collecting minerals at age five, was elected to the New York Minerological Club at eleven,[8] and delivered his first paper there at age 12.[9] His shy awkwardness earned him the nickname "Booby" Oppenheimer among his peers; he was bullied, culminating in being locked naked in an icehouse overnight as retribution for alleged tattling.[10]

'Social justice' can be given a meaning only in a directed or 'command' economy (such as an army) in which the individuals are ordered what to do; and any particular conception of 'social justice' could be realized only in such a centrally-directed system.[19]

”

Oppenheimer never did embrace Judaism, turning instead to philosophical Hinduism. He apparently never studied Hebrew but learned Sanskrit and read the Bhavagad Gita in the original language; he would later list it as one of the the ten books that did most to shape his “philosophy of life.”[20] What flashed through his mind upon witnessing the Trinity explosion, he said, was a line from this Hindu scripture:

Education

Oppenheimer attended Harvard University, where he majored in chemistry, graduating summa cum laude in just three years.[22] One of his physics professors, Percy Bridgman, noted in his graduate-school recommendation that "it appears to me that it is a bit of a gamble as to whether Oppenheimer will ever make any real contributions of an important character."[23] Oppenheimer went to England for postgraduate study at Cambridge University, where he hoped to work under the Nobel Prize winnerErnest Rutherford. "But Rutherford wouldn't have me," according to Oppenheimer.[24]

At Cambridge, Oppenheimer became deeply depressed and jealous of the success of some of the people around him, particularly of his tutor, the future Nobel laureate Patrick Blackett, three years his senior. According to Oppenheimer's friend John Edsall:

“

Oppenheimer's feeling toward Blackett was one of intense admiration, combined perhaps with an intense jealousy—jealousy because of his feeling that Blackett was brilliant and handsome and a man of great social charm, and combining all this with great brilliance as a scientist—and I think he had a sense of his own comparative awkwardness and perhaps a sense of being physically unattractive compared to Blackett and so on.[25]

”

In the fall of 1925, Oppenheimer left a "poisoned apple" laced with chemicals (possibly cyanide) from the laboratory on Blackett's desk.[26] University authorities immediately informed Oppenheimer's parents (who were visiting Cambridge at the time) what had happened. According to a Pulitzer Prize-winning[27] biography of Oppenheimer:

“

His father frantically—and successfully—lobbied the university not to press criminal charges. After protracted negotiations, it was agreed that Robert would be put on probation and have regular sessions with a prominent Harley Street psychiatrist in London. This Freudian analyst diagnosed dementia praecox, a now archaic label for symptoms associated with schizophrenia. He concluded that Oppenheimer was a hopeless case and that "further analysis would do more harm than good".[28]

”

Oppenheimer went to Paris for a rest. His boyhood friend Francis Fergusson visited him there, and mentioned that he had become engaged. For the second time, Oppenheimer committed an apparent attempted murder:

“

"I leaned over to pick up a book," Fergusson recalled, "and he jumped on me from behind with a trunk strap and wound it around my neck. I was quite scared for a little while. We must have made some noise. And then I managed to pull aside and he fell on the ground weeping."[29]

”

In 1926, Oppenheimer left Cambridge for the University of Göttingen in Germany. He developed a reputation for obnoxiousness, once chiding a graduate student couple for what he called their "peasant" ways in not being able to afford a baby-sitter.[30] He had a habit of interrupting others (including his professor) and commandeering the blackboard; the future Nobel Prize-winner Maria Göppart once presented Oppenheimer's faculty adviser, Max Born, with a petition threatening a boycott of his seminar unless the "child prodigy" were reigned in.[31] Oppenheimer obtained a Ph.D. in physics in 1927, then obtained a National Research Council fellowship funded by the Rockefeller Foundation.[32] He did post-doctoral work at Harvard, then the California Institute of Technology, finally taking a position as an associate professor of physics at the University of California at Berkeley.

Personal life and Communist affiliation

At Caltech, Oppenheimer had befriended the "long-serving Soviet tool"[34] Linus Pauling, and wrote him poems Pauling found "troubling," which included allusions to pederasty. Pauling broke off the friendship after Oppenheimer made a pass at his wife, Ava Helen Pauling, who told her husband, "I think he was in love with you."[35] At Berkeley, rumors circulated of an affair between Oppenheimer and a homosexual student who lived with him,[36] but in 1936 he began an affair with Jean Tatlock, a medical student at Stanford[37] and daughter of Oppenheimer's fellow Berkeley professor John S.P. Tatlock,[38] a contributor to The Nation.[39]

Oppenheimer's mistress Tatlock was a Communist.[40] In 1939, Oppenheimer began an affair with another Communist,[41] the German-born Katherine "Kitty" Puening Dallet Harrison, widow of Communist political commissar Joe Dallet, killed in the Spanish Civil War.[42] After moving in with Oppenheimer and becoming pregnant,[43] Kitty abandoned her third husband,[44] a cancer researcher at Caltech,[45] to marry Oppenheimer in 1940, though he continued his affair with Tatlock until at least June 1943. (In January 1944, Tatlock would be found drowned in her bathtub, in circumstances termed "suspicious.")[46] During the war, while married to Kitty, Oppenheimer began an affair with another married woman, Ruth Tolman, the wife of Caltech physicist Richard Tolman, whom Oppenheimer testified was "a very close and dear friend of mine."[47] The affair "devastated Richard Tolman,"[48] who died, according to Nobel Prize-winning physicist Ernest Lawrence, "of a broken heart."[49] Kitty took to drinking.[50]

Oppenheimer’s brother Frank, and Frank’s wife Jackie, were also active members of the Communist Party,[51] as was even Oppenheimer's landlady; in addition, several of Oppenheimer’s closest friends and protégés among his graduate students at Berkeley, including Giovanni Rossi Lomanitz, Joe Weinberg, David Bohm, Philip Morrison and Bernard Peters were Communist Party members.[52]

When he joined the Manhattan Project in 1942,[67] Oppenheimer wrote on his personal security questionnaire that he had been "a member of just about every Communist Front organization on the West Coast."[68] In September 1943, he repeated to Gen. Leslie Groves, head of the Manhattan Project, that he had "probably belonged to every Communist-front organization on the west coast."[69] Later that month, Lt. Col. John Lansdale, Jr., head of Security and Intelligence for the Manhattan Project, interviewed Oppenheimer, stating: "You've probably belonged to every front organization on the coast"; Oppenheimer reiterated: "Just about."[70]

More than a decade later, when the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) was considering whether to renew his security clearance, Oppenheimer would change his story, writing that he did not remember saying this, that it was not true, and that if he had said anything along those lines, it was “a half-jocular overstatement.”[71] Yet less than four months after writing this, when the AEC got Oppenheimer on the witness stand, he would again change his story: Asked, “If you said that to Colonel Lansdale, were you jocular?” Oppenheimer would admit under oath, “I don’t think I could have been jocular during this interview.”[72]

Oppenheimer confessed, "I was associated with the Communist movement,"[73] and admitted having subscribed to the Communist Party organ People's World[74] "for several years."[75] Throughout the Nazi-Soviet pact, when many other formerly stalwart Communists dropped out of the movement in disgust, Oppenheimer was, by his own admission, active in a number of Communist fronts. He admitted having been a member of the western council of the Consumers Union[76] (according the FBI, he actually became a member of the Board of Counselors of this organization),[77] which was designated as subversive by the Dies committee in 1939,[78] during the pact. In addition, from 1939 until at least 1942[79] (throughout the duration of the pact), admitted Oppenheimer, he was a member of the American Committee for Democracy and Intellectual Freedom, which was identified by HUAC as a Communist front in 1942 and by a special subcommittee of the House Committee on Appropriations as subversive and un-American the following year.[80] Oppenheimer claimed not to remember sponsoring the American Friends of the Chinese People[81] (identified as a Communist front by HUAC in 1944),[82] but the organization listed him as a sponsor[83] in 1940,[84] during the pact.

In addition, according to the FBI, Oppenheimer reportedly co-founded the Berkeley Conference for Civic Betterment (identified by the FBI as a “front group”); was “a member of the Executive Committee of the American Civil Liberties Union, a Communist Party front group [in 1939, during the pact]”;[85] a member of the Medical Bureau to Aid Spanish Democracy[86] (identified by HUAC in 1944 as one in a "series of Communist enterprises");[87] a member of the National Emergency Conference for Democratic Rights (identified as as subversive and un-American by a special subcommittee of the House Committee on Appropriations in 1943, and as a Communist front by HUAC the following year);[88] and a donor to the Spanish Aid Committee,[89] identified as a Communist front by HUAC in 1944 and as Communist by Truman administration Attorney GeneralTom Clark in 1949.[90]

Communist Party membership

But Oppenheimer “was not simply a casual Popular Front liberal who ignorantly bumped up against the CPUSA in some of the areas in which it operated," according to John Earl Haynes, a Soviet espionage expert in the Manuscript Division of the Library of Congress:[91] "He was, in fact, a concealed member of the CPUSA in the late 1930s,” write Haynes, Emory University Professor Harvey Klehr and ex-KGB agent Alexander Vassiliev.[92] “Robert Oppenheimer was a member of a so-called closed unit of the Communist Party's professional section in Berkeley, from 1938 to 1942,” agrees Gregg Herken, a former senior Historian at the Smithsonian Institution.[93] Stanford University historian Barton Bernstein, an expert on Oppenheimer, concurs that "it seems to me far more likely than not from the amalgam of evidence that Oppenheimer was a member, at least covert, for a few years."[94]

If Oppenheimer was not a Communist, he fooled Communist Party officials into thinking he was. Paul Crouch, Communist Party organizer for Alameda County in 1941, testified that Oppenheimer had been a Communist at that time, and even described the interior layout of his home:[95]

“

Chairman: Is there any doubt in your mind that Oppenheimer was a member of the Communist Party?

Crouch: No, sir, none whatever. I met him in a closed meeting of the Communist Party in a house which was subsequently found to have been his residence at the time... and following that I met him at quite a number of Communist Party affairs in Alameda County.[96]

”

In 1945, in an Executive Committee meeting of a Communist Party branch in Alameda County,[97] both the Communist Jack Manley and his wife, Communist Party functionary Katrina Sandow (alias “Katherine Sanders”),[98] according to FBI surveillance, “stated that Oppenheimer was a Communist Party member.”[99]

If Oppenheimer was not a Communist, he not only convinced the Communist Party he was, he convinced Soviet intelligence itself. A 1944 report by NKVDSan Franciscorezident (station chief) Grigory Kheifetz[100] states: “According to 'Uncle' (Isaac Folkoff),[101] both brothers [Robert and Frank Oppenheimer] were associated with the fellowcountrymen,"[102]NKVD code name for the Communist Party.[103] That year, NKVD agents Gaik Ovakimian and Andrei Graur reported to NKVD chief Boris Merkulov, identifying the code name "Chester" as "Robert Oppenheimer, b. 1906, an Amer. Jew, secret member of the fellowcountryman org., a professor at the U. of California, works on ‘En-s’,"[104] i.e., 'Enormoz,' Soviet code name for the Manhattan Project.[105] Merkulov, reporting in turn to Soviet Commissar for Internal Affairs Lavrenty Beria, identified “one of the leaders of scientific work on uranium in the USA, Professor R. Oppenheimer,” as “an unlisted member of the apparatus of Comrade Browder,” General Secretary of the CPUSA.[106]

"Closed" unit

During 1938-42, throughout the Hitler-Stalin pact, Oppenheimer was a member at Berkeley of what he called a "discussion group,"[107] which was later identified by fellow members Chevalier[108] and Gordon Griffiths[109] as a “closed” (secret)[110] unit of the Communist Party for Berkeley faculty. If Oppenheimer was not a Communist, he was the only member of this group who was not.[111]

In addition, if he was not a Communist, Oppenheimer fooled not just Soviet intelligence and the Communist Party, but even his close friends in this small, secretive group into thinking he was. According to Chevalier, “O. had been, from 1937 to 1943, a CP member, which I knew directly.”[112] He added that he and Oppenheimer belonged to “the same unit of the CP from 1938 to 1942.”[113] Griffiths, who served as the Communist Party's “liaison with the Faculty group at the University of California,” confirmed that among the “members of the communist group” at Berkeley were “Haakon Chevalier of the French Department and Robert Oppenheimer of Physics.”[114]

Oppenheimer was the primary author of a report signed “College Faculties Committee, Communist Party of California,” which he also paid to have printed, said Chevalier.[115] It defended the Soviet invasion of Finland (during the Nazi-Soviet pact), calling PresidentRoosevelt a "counter-revolutionary war-monger."[116] The report contains unusual wording characteristic of Oppenheimer’s writing, suggesting that Oppenheimer might at least have "had a hand in editing a draft," according to historian Martin J. Sherwin.[117]MIT physics professor emeritus (and former Oppenheimer pupil) Philip Morrison, an ex-Communist,[118] confirmed that in 1939 (during the Pact) he delivered to the printers a pamphlet Oppenheimer wrote (and paid for) taking “the strict Party line in defending the Soviet invasion of Finland.”[119]

"Unlisted member"

In April 1942 Oppenheimer's name was formally submitted for security clearance for the Manhattan Project; the following month, observed William L. Borden, executive director of the congressional Joint Committee on Atomic Energy (JCAE), Oppenheimer "either stopped contributing funds to the Communist Party or else made his contributions through a new channel not yet discovered."[120] Oppenheimer "appears to have dropped out of the party in early 1942,” write Haynes, Klehr and Vassiliev.[121] According to Jerrold L. Schecter, spokesman for the National Security Administration in the Carter administration, “Robert Oppenheimer’s long time membership in the Communist Party of the United States was made secret in 1942.”[122]

FBI surveillance in 1942-43 reported that Alameda County Communist Party Secretary Bernadette Doyle told John Murra, a “suspected intelligence agent of the USSR,” that “OPPENHEIMER was a party member but that his name should be removed from any mailing lists in John Murra’s possession and he should not mention it in any way,” and told Nelson (according to a telephone intercept)[123] “that she believes the matter should be taken up with the state committee regarding the two OPPIES, inasmuch as they were regularly registered [as members of the Communist Party] and everyone in the county knew they were Communists."[124]

According to Kheifetz, "due to their special military work, the connection with them [Robert and Frank Oppenheimer] was suspended.”[125] Ovakimian and Graur reported to Merkulov: “In view of the special significance and importance of the work he does... the fellowcountryman organization received orders from its center to break off relations with ‘Ch.’ [i.e., "Chester," Oppenheimer's code name] to avoid his exposure.”[126] Merkulov summarized:

“

Due to complications of the operational situation in the USA, dissolution of the Comintern[127] and explanations of Comrades Zarubin and Kheifets on the Mironov affair[128] it is expedient to immediately sever contacts of leaders and activists of the American Communist Party with scientists and specialists engaged in work on uranium.[129]

”

A 1945 Soviet code-message refers to instructions to “send GURON [‘Huron’][130] to CHICAGO to re-establish contact with VEKSEL….” The National Security Agency’s Venona project analysts identified VEKSEL as “Probably Dr. Julius Robert Oppenheimer.”[131]

Espionage at Los Alamos

The CHAIRMAN. ...Is there any doubt in your mind... [that] Oppenheimer was under Communist party discipline at the time you were attending these Communist meetings with him?

Mr. CROUCH. No, sir, none whatever.

The CHAIRMAN. And if he were under Communist party discipline, he, of course, would be bound to turn over any atomic secrets to them that he had available?

Mr. CROUCH. That the party directed.

The CHAIRMAN. And naturally they would be interested in any atomic information he had?

Mr. CROUCH. Yes, sir. Just as a matter of fact, the Communist Party might have chosen to direct him to turn over the information; they might have chosen to direct him to appoint other Communists to key positions who would in turn, turn over the information. It is a matter of record that Dr. Oppenheimer has appointed many Communists to key positions to the atomic energy program..."[132]

”

Among those Oppenheimer brought into the project were his former grad students Bohm, Peters and Lomanitz; his brother Frank; and David Hawkins—all of whom were well known to him to be “members of the Communist Party or closely associated with activities of the Communist Party.”[133] Frank testified that he was a member (under the cover name "Frank Fulsome") from 1937 until 1940 or '41;[134] Hawkins testified that he was a member at Berkeley from 1938 to 1943;[135] Bohm officially joined the Communist Party in 1942[136] and later testified that he was a member at the Berkeley Radiation Laboratory during World War II.[137]

In 1942, FBI surveillance recorded Lomanitz telling Nelson he was working on a highly secret weapon; Nelson advised Lomanitz to keep his Party activity quiet[138] as he was now considered a member of the underground.[139] Oppenheimer said he knew "for a fact" by August 1943 that Lomanitz was a Communist Party member.[140] Yet when, following an espionage investigation,[141] the Army released Lomanitz from Berkeley, causing him to lose his draft deferment, Oppenheimer sent an "urgent request" by telegram, urging Lomanitz' "continued availability to project,"[142] and subsequently attempted to get the Army to release Lomanitz to return to the Radiation Laboratory.[143]

In 1949, just before Lomanitz was to testify before HUAC, Oppenheimer met him on a sidewalk in Princeton, N.J., (where presumably "the FBI found it difficult to monitor his conversations"),[144] and discussed what he would say to the committee. Oppenheimer testified that the meeting was by chance, and that he only advised Lomanitz to tell the truth. But when he testified, Lomanitz refused on grounds of potential self-incrimination to answer whether or not he had been a Communist.[145]

Oppenheimer also testified that he knew "for a fact" by August 1943 that Weinberg was a Communist Party member[146] and had heard even at Berkeley that Weinberg had been a member of the Young Communist League.[147] FBI surveillance recorded Weinberg, who had gotten into the Manhattan project using Oppenheimer as a reference, telling Nelson he had been a Communist Party member since 1938.[148] Nelson warned Weinberg to burn his party membership book.[149] In 1943, FBI surveillance recorded Weinberg ("Scientist X") reading to Nelson "what appeared to be a technical formula used in the Project," which Nelson copied down.[150] Weinberg told Nelson he had to return the formula to the University of California Radiation Laboratories in the morning. Several days later Nelson met with Peter Ivanov (a GRU agent operating out of the Soviet consulate in San Francisco,[151] where Kheifetz was under cover as vice consul),[152] and gave him a package.[153] A few days later, "Zubilin" (Vasily Zarubin, NKVD station chief in the U.S. from 1941 to 1944) was transferred from the Soviet Embassy in Washington to the San Francisco consulate. Shortly thereafter, Zubilin gave Nelson ten bills of unknown denominations.[154]

At least three of the five scientists under Oppenheimer's direct supervision leaked secret information about the atomic bomb to the Soviet Union. These include Klaus Fuchs, Theodore Hall, and David Greenglass.[155] KGB archival data smuggled out by Vassiliev reveal that two more spies, Boris Podolsky (code-named Quantum) and Russell McNutt (code-named Fogel, later changed to Pers), were also at Los Alamos during Oppenheimer's tenure.[156]

Allegations against Oppenheimer

According to Herbert Romerstein, former chief of the U.S. Information Agency's Office to Counter Soviet Disinformation and Active Measures:[157] "Atomic scientist J. Robert Oppenheimer performed work on behalf of the Soviet Union."[158] Oppenheimer supplied the Soviets with classified reports on atom bomb development—in part via Elizabeth Zarubina (wife of Vasily Zarubin), who was in direct contact with Oppenheimer's wife, Kitty—according to Pavel Sudoplatov, Moscow-based overseer of Soviet atom-bomb espionage. In his 1994 memoir, Sudoplatov wrote:

“

I set up a network of illegals who convinced Robert Oppenheimer, Enrico Fermi, Leo Szilard, Bruno Pontecorvo, Alan Nunn May, Klaus Fuchs and other scientists in America and Great Britain to share atomic secrets with us..... We received reports on the progress of the Manhattan Project from Oppenheimer and his friends in oral form, through comments and asides, and from documents transferred through clandestine methods with their full knowledge that the information they were sharing would be passed on. One agent cited Oppenheimer's stressing that information should be leaked so as not to be traceable to those who worked in Los Alamos. In all, there were five classified reports made available by Oppenheimer describing the progress of work on the atomic bomb.[159]

”

Sudoplatov's allegations are corroborated by a 1982 letter he wrote to then-Soviet Premier Yuri Andropov, stating: "Department S [Sudoplatov's department] rendered considerable help to our scientists by giving them the latest materials on atom bomb research, obtained from such sources as the famous nuclear physicists R. Oppenheimer, E. Fermi, K. Fuchs and others."[160] Romerstein and Breindel comment: "It would have made no sense for Sudoplatov to lie to Andropov, the former head of KGB and dictator of the Soviet Union, who would have easily found him out."[161]

According to FBI surveillance in 1943, Nelson (who often visited Oppenheimer's wife in Berkeley)[162] advised Weinberg "that OPPENHEIMER had indicated to him the basic idea of the project";[163] in 1945, Jack Manley would state that “Oppenheimer told Steven Nelson several years ago that the Army was working on the atomic bomb.”[164]

Merkulov reported to Beria, "In 1942 one of the leaders of scientific work on uranium in the USA, Professor R. Oppenheimer... informed us about the beginning of work. On the request of Comrade Kheifitz,[165] confirmed by Comrade Browder, he provided cooperation in access to research for several of our tested sources including a relative of Comrade Browder."[166] (Browder's niece, Helen Lowry, was a Soviet agent married to Iskhak Akhmerov,[167] the leading NKVD "illegal" in the United States.)[168] Schecter concludes that Oppenheimer “was being used as a Soviet intelligence asset by the Communist Underground to help obtain atomic secrets.”[169]

The Chevalier incident

In 1943, the Soviets tried to establish direct contact with Oppenheimer. Ivanov instructed George Eltenton (a British-born Soviet intelligence source code-named “Dorin”)[170] to feel Oppenheimer out about covertly leaking American nuclear secrets to the Soviet Union, according to Eltenton’s statement to the FBI.[171] Eltenton said he asked Chevalier to pitch the idea to Oppenheimer.[172] Chevalier approached Oppenheimer in February or March 1943, but Oppenheimer failed to report the incident for some eight months.[173]

Approximately six weeks after Oppenheimer's security clearance came through, on August 25, Lieutenant Lyall Johnson, the security officer at Berkeley, questioned him about Lomanitz, whom Oppenheimer had tried to keep on the Manhattan Project, even though he had supplied highly sensitive information to the Soviets.[174] Oppenheimer stated that he had heard that Eltenton, too, had offered to supply technical data to the Soviets.[175] Johnson immediately called Lieutenant Colonel Boris T. Pash, Chief of Counter-Intelligence for the Ninth Army Corps on the West Coast.[176] The following day, Pash and Johnson interrogated Oppenheimer about Eltenton. Oppenheimer stated:

“

I think it is true that a man, whose name I never heard, who was attached to the Soviet consul, has indicated indirectly through intermediary people concerned in this project that he was in a position to transmit, without any danger of a leak, or scandal, or anything of that kind, information, which they might supply.

”

Oppenheimer then named Eltenton, stating:

“

He has probably been asked to do what he can to provide information. Whether he is successful or not, I do not know, but he talked to a friend of his who is also an acquaintance of one of the men on the project, and that was one of the channels by which this thing went.

”

Johnson asked whether "there was a particular person, maybe a person on the project that they were trying to pump information from."

Oppenheimer answered, "I have known of 2 or 3 cases, and I think two of the men were with me at Los Alamos—they are men who are very closely associated with me." Eltenton, he added, "had very good contacts with a man from the embassy attached to the consulate who was a very reliable guy (that's his story) and who had a lot of experience in microfilm work, or whatever the hell." Eltenton did not contact anyone on the Manhattan Project directly, said Oppenheimer, but through an intermediary, "a member of the [Berkeley] faculty, but not on the project."[177]

The following month Colonel Lansdale told Oppenheimer that "we have known since February that several people were transmitting information about this project to the Soviet Government." Oppenheimer said the intermediary, whom he still refused to name, was "an acquaintance of mine, I've known over many years," adding, "I know him as a fellow traveler." Lansdale confronted Oppenheimer, stating: "I have reason to believe that you yourself were felt out, I don't say asked, but felt out to ascertain how you felt about it, passing a little information, to the party." Then Lansdale struck home:

“

L. [Lansdale] How about Haakon Chevalier?

O. [Oppenheimer] Is he a member of the party?

L. I don't know.

O. He is a member of the faculty and I know him well. I wouldn't be surprised if he were a member, he is quite a Red.[178]

Oppenheimer refused to admit Chevalier's involvement for ten months.[181] Finally, in December 1943, Groves told Oppenheimer to divulge the name. "I told him if you don't tell me, I am going to have to order you to do it," Groves would later testify. Oppenheimer promptly answered that it was Chevalier. When Groves asked the names of the three people Chevalier had approached, however, Oppenheimer changed his story: there were not three people, but only one—Oppenheimer himself. From what Oppenheimer told him, Groves concluded:

“

that there was an approach made, that Dr. Oppenheimer knew of this approach, that at some point he was involved in that the approach was made to him—I don't mean involved in the sense that he gave anything—I mean he just knew about it personally from the fact that he was in the chain, and that he didn't report it in its entirety as he should have done.

”

Groves did not believe Oppenheimer's new story, testifying that he "had the very definite impression that Dr. Oppenheimer
wanted to protect his friends of long standing, possibly his brother."[182]

But Oppenheimer insisted that what he had told Pash about the three contacts was actually just “a cock-and-bull story.”[183] "This whole thing was a pure fabrication except for the one name Eltenton," testified Oppenheimer, who called his previous story "a piece of idiocy" that was "wholly false."[184] Asked "You lied to him?" Oppenheimer answered "Yes." Asked under oath for an explanation of why he had lied, the brilliant physicist testified, “Because I was an idiot.”[185] Despite this incident, Oppenheimer was still meeting with Chevalier a decade later, including once in Paris,[186] where, again, presumably "the FBI found it difficult to monitor his conversations."[187]

Policy influence

The successful development of the atomic bomb gave the United States an enormous advantage over the Soviet Union. Following the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, NKVD Chief Lavrenty Beria "said we should think how to use Oppenheimer, Szilard and others around them in the peace campaign against nuclear armament," according to Sudoplatov. "Disarmament and the inability to impose nuclear blackmail would deprive the United States of its advantage."[188] On October 3, 1945, PresidentTruman read an address to Congress stating that "atomic energy constitutes a new force too revolutionary to consider in the framework of old ideas."[189] The speech advocated "the renunciation of the use"[190] of the atom bomb, and proposed "international collaboration and exchange of scientific information"[191] about it. On October 19, wrote Henry Wallace,[192] Oppenheimer "told me that the President’s statement to Congress had been written by Dean Acheson’s assistant, a Mr. Herbert Marks,[193] and that he [Oppenheimer] had had something to do with helping Marks on the message."[194]

Peace offensive

Two days previously, Wallace and Oppenheimer had attended a meeting at Washington's Statler Hotel[195] with Szilard, Fermi, Edward U. Condon,[196] Harlow Shapley,[197] and others. "The scientists presented in very vigorous terms the peril in which the United States now finds herself... chiefly... the threat to peace," wrote Wallace. "Oppenheimer said he very much wanted to see me and I made arrangements..."[198] At their meeting two days later, wrote Wallace:

“

I never saw a man in such an extremely nervous state as Oppenheimer. He seemed to feel that the destruction of the entire human race was imminent... He has been in charge of the scientists in New Mexico and says... that all they think about now are the social and economic implications of the bomb... He wanted to know if I thought it would do any good for him to see the President. I said yes, and he is going to try to get either Secretary Patterson[199] or Senator Kilgore[200] to make an appointment for him.[201]

”

Within a week, Oppenheimer met with Truman at the White House. Oppenheimer urged the President to surrender the U.S. nuclear monopoly to international control. Truman was outraged, telling Secretary of StateDean Acheson, "I don't want to see that son-of-a-bitch in this office ever again."[202]
Nevertheless, Truman later appealed to Oppenheimer for help in "giving the army permanent control over atomic energy."[203] Oppenheimer did just the opposite, using his influence to turn the army's control of nuclear power over to the the civilian AEC in 1946.[204] That year, Oppenheimer was one of the primary architects of the Acheson-Lillienthal Report, which proposed turning control of the U.S. nuclear arsenal over to the United Nations.[205]

During their June 2000 meeting, Russian President Vladimir Putin, an ex-KGB agent, told U.S. President Bill Clinton a story concerning "Joseph Stalin's decision to put his secret police chief, Lavrenti Beria, in charge of ferreting out the secrets of the American crash program to develop the atomic bomb during World War II."

“

Putin had words of praise for the American scientists who willingly helped the USSR develop its own A-bomb. They were not traitors to their country, he said. Rather, they were serving the cause of international peace.[206]

”

In 2012, according to Russia's government news agency Itar-Tass, Putin amplified these remarks:

“

You know, when the States already had nuclear weapons and the Soviet Union was only building them, we got a significant amount of information through Soviet foreign intelligence channels ... They were carrying the information away not on microfilm but literally in suitcases. Suitcases! ... It was the cream of the scientific world that was gathered in America, and I personally have gotten the impression that they consciously gave us information on the atom bomb ... They did this consciously because the atom bomb had been used on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and scientists from mankind’s intellectual elite at the time understood what unilateral possession of such a weapon might lead to.[207]

”

The H-bomb

In 1947, Oppenheimer became Chairman of the AEC's General Advisory Committee (GAC) on Science.[208] On September 23, 1949, Truman announced that the Soviets had exploded their own atomic bomb.[209] (Within a month of breaking the U.S. nuclear monopoly, Soviet-backed Communist rebels would seize control of China, inaugurating a regime that would eventually murder some 70 million Chinese;[210] within a year, Soviet and Communist Chinese-backed North Korea would invade its neighbor to the south, launching a war that would claim more than 30,000 American lives.)[211] AEC Commissioner Lewis Strauss, president of the board of trustees of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton (where Oppenheimer was director), responded with a proposal that the U.S. make it "highest priority" to build a hydrogen bomb (then called the "super bomb").[212]

On October 14, 1949, one GAC member, Glenn Seaborg, then a future Nobel Laureate (and future AEC Chairman), wrote to Oppenheimer, “I have been unable to come to the conclusion that we should not” proceed with this crash program to develop an H-bomb. “I would have to hear some good arguments before I could take on sufficient courage to recommend not going toward such a program."[213]

Yet, ten days later, Oppenheimer told the AEC that among GAC members there was “a surprising unanimity—to me very surprising—that the United States ought not to take the initiative... in an all out program for the development of thermonuclear weapons.”[214] He claimed that didn't know how Seaborg felt about it, as he “was in Sweden, and there was no communication with him.”[215] Oppenheimer later confessed that he had received Seaborg's letter before he made these claims, yet he repeated them three months later, before the JCAE.[216]
When nuclear physicist Edward Teller, a HungarianJewish refugee from Nazi Germany[217] known as the "father of the H-bomb,"[218] had sought Oppenheimer's support to build an H-bomb at Los Alamos in 1945, Oppenheimer had refused. Now, argued Teller, the need for an H-bomb had become urgent. Oppenheimer disagreed, signing his name to an official statement that "a super bomb should never be produced."[219] With Fermi and others, he lobbied Henry Wallace to stop H-bomb development; Wallace complied, issuing a statement that “we should prefer defeat in war to victory obtained at the expense of the enormous human disaster that would be caused by its determined use.”[220] As Teller would later testify:

“

In a great number of cases I have seen Dr. Oppenheimer act... in a way which for me was exceedingly hard to understand. I thoroughly disagreed with him in numerous issues and his actions frankly appeared to me confused and complicated. To this extent I feel that I would like to see the vital interests of this country in hands which I understand better, and therefore trust more... If it is a question of wisdom and judgment, as demonstrated by actions since 1945, then I would say one would be wiser not to grant clearance.[221]

”

Sergei Leskov, science correspondent for Izvestia, a Moscow newspaper in which the Russian government holds a controlling stake, reported in 1994 that Russian government officials informed him

“

that as well as Klaus Fuchs, who was imprisoned for espionage in Britain for 14 years, and "Perseus," an unidentified agent who has been mentioned frequently in recent years, there were 10 agents of similar caliber working in the West. Six worked in the United States, four in Britain. They were significant figures who remain unknown to the FBI to this day.[222]

”

HUAC hearing

In 1943, Lansdale had asked Oppenheimer, "Do you know a fellow named Rudy Lambert [chief of security for the California Communist Party, identified in Venona as a Soviet intelligence source on uranium]?"[223] Oppenheimer answered, "I'm not sure, do you know what he looks like?"[224] Yet in 1949, Oppenheimer testified before HUAC that he had met Lambert half a dozen times before 1943, and not only knew then that he was a Communist official,[225] but even described him ("A lean, rather handsome man, moderate height, rather an effective speaker in conversation.")[226] The following colloquy would ensue:

“

You knew what Rudy Lambert looked like, didn't you?

A. Sure.

Q. Why did you ask Lansdale what he looked like?

A. I don't know that I did.

Q. If you did, Doctor, would it mean that you were ducking the question?

Although Oppenheimer has long been presented as a "martyr to McCarthyism," it has been suggested that had Oppenheimer not been stripped of his clearance, he might be disrespected (like Elia Kazan)[228] for "naming names"[229] to save his own skin.[230] Oppenheimer testified that he thought one of his graduate students, Bernard Peters (husband of Communist Party official Hannah Peters),[231] told him circa 1938 that he [Peters] had been a member of the Communist Party.[232] Yet in 1942 or '43 Oppenheimer invited Peters to join him at Los Alamos.[233] A few months later, during a background interview to obtain his security clearance, Oppenheimer identified Peters "as a Communist."[234] The following year, Major Peer De Silva, chief of security at Los Alamos, interviewed Oppenheimer. Among his former students, Oppenheimer named Bohm and Peters as "truly dangerous,"[235] according to De Silva's report, singling out Peters in particular as a "crazy person" who was "quite a red."[236] Oppenheimer also testified before HUAC that Peters told him that he had been "a member of the German National Communist Party."[237]

After this testimony was leaked to the press,[238] Condon, then Director of the Commerce Department's National Bureau of Standards (dealing with classified data on nuclear weapons, radar, and guided missiles), wrote a letter to the editor containing “a severe attack on Dr. Oppenheimer”[239] and tried to start various rumors alleging that Oppenheimer was either losing his mind or converting to the Catholic Church.[240] He also wrote Oppenheimer a letter accusing him of trying to "buy immunity for yourself by turning informer"[241] and demanding that he "try to make restitution," threatening that if Oppenheimer's own "file were ever made public, it would be a much bigger flap":[242] "You know very well that once these people decide to go into your own dossier and make it public that it will make the 'revelations' that you have made so far look pretty tame."[243]

Under pressure from Condon and others, Oppenheimer wrote a letter to the editor that "retracted some of the testimony," stating that "Dr. Peters has recently informed me... that I was wrong in believing... that he had ever held a membership in the Communist Party."[244]

Oppenheimer "was very much influenced [in 1942]... by the influence of Dr. Condon," according to Groves. Condon, Groves testified, "did a tremendous amount of damage at Los Alamos in the initial setup."[245] Groves testified that he believed that Condon was "responsible for the rules—that tended to break down compartmentalization" at Los Alamos, thus making it difficult to control the diffusion of secrets and prevent espionage. Just before the Trinity explosion, the Soviets scheduled a scientific conference in Moscow. The Kremlin invited several U.S. scientists to attend—a fact that a member of the State Department tried to keep secret from the Army, according to Groves. Among those invited was Condon, but the U.S. government revoked his passport to prevent him from attending. Condon "made a terrific battle to go," testified Groves:

“

That battle was so unrealistic and so completely lacking in appreciation of what was the best interest of the United States that you couldn't help but feel that either he was such an utter fool that he could not be trusted, or else that he put his own personal desires above those of the welfare of the country and therefore he was in effect disloyal, even if it was not a case of deliberately going out to aid the enemy.[246]

”

AEC hearing

Pursuant to PresidentEisenhower's Executive Order 10450 of April 27, 1953, new security standards were applied to all federal officials, including Oppenheimer. On May 15, Senator Joseph McCarthy (R-WI), Chairman of the PSI, asked FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover if the Bureau would object to the PSI holding hearings on Oppenheimer. Hoover told him that the FBI had no objections. Syndicated columnist Joseph Alsop, a blood relative of both Eleanor and Franklin Roosevelt (and a friend of Oppenheimer's) delivered a seven-page letter to the White House asking Ike to block the investigation.[247]

The prospect of a McCarthy hearing spooked the administration into finally taking action: on June 22, Strauss asked Hoover to get McCarthy to hold off until the AEC could conduct its own hearings. In November, Borden wrote to Hoover, stating in his “exhaustively considered opinion, based upon years of study, of the available classified evidence, that more probably than not J. Robert Oppenheimer is an agent of the Soviet Union."[248] The following month (the same month Oppenheimer met with Chevalier in Paris), after reviewing material brought to his attention by the Department of Justice, Eisenhower, in consultation with the Secretary of Defense, the Director of the Office of Defense Mobilization and the AEC Chairman, ordered that, pending a security review, “a blank wall be placed between Dr. Oppenheimer and any secret data,”[249] and the AEC notified Oppenheimer that his clearance was under review, sending him a letter laying out charges against him.

On March 4, 1954, Oppenheimer sent a written response to AEC General Manager K.D. Nichols. The following month, Oppenheimer released the text of the administration's charges to the press, along with his response.

PSB Hearing

On April 12, the AEC's Personnel Security Board (PSB) opened hearings on the charges. The PSB was a three-member panel headed by former Secretary of the Army Gordon Gray, President of the University of North Carolina (after whom it is sometimes referred to as the “Gray board”). Also on the PSB were Ward V. Evans, professor emeritus of chemistry at Loyola University of Chicago; and Thomas Morgan, 66, a retired businessman.

Oppenheimer was represented pro bono by the white shoe firm[250] of Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, joined by former AEC general counsel Herbert Marks, the former Special Assistant to Under Secretary of State Dean Acheson who, with Oppenheimer's help, had written Truman's 1945 address proposing international sharing of nuclear secrets.

After eight weeks of testimony and cross-examination, and exhibits including transcripts and FBI reports, the panel voted 2-1 to strip Oppenheimer of his “Q clearance” access to atomic secrets. Gray and Morgan carried the majority, with Evans dissenting. Joseph and Stewart Alsop, "long-standing Oppenheimer partisans," used their influential syndicated columns to put forward a conspiracy theory: the Gray board's findings, alleged the Alsops, were part of a conspiracy by AEC Chairman Strauss to even an old personal grudge against Oppenheimer. Despite the fact that it "conveniently overlooked the matter of Gray's record and integrity,"[251] the left adopted the Alsops' conspiracy theory as the dogmatic explanation of Oppenheimer's security problems.

Appeal

Oppenheimer appealed the PSB's decision to the full Atomic Energy Commission. Joining his legal team was former Democratic Party presidential candidate John W. Davis,[252] fresh from his defeated defense of segregation in Brown v. Board of Education.[253] Davis had previously testified as a character witness for Soviet agent Alger Hiss.[254]

Citing “proof of fundamental defects in his ‘character’,” to wit, “his associations with persons known to him to be Communists,” which associations, said the AEC, “have extended far beyond the tolerable limits of prudence and self-restraint which are to be expected of one holding the high positions that the Government has continuously entrusted to him since 1942,” the commission upheld the decision stripping the former chairman of its own GAC[255] of his security clearance.[256]

Legacy

In June 1997, the KGB museum in Moscow featured an exhibit of "leading atomic espionage agents and espionage documents." The exhibit featured Oppenheimer's image, displayed along with a photograph of convicted Soviet atomic spy Klaus Fuchs, and a shot of a Manhattan Project laboratory site. "Oppenheimer and other top scientists cooperated with us," former KGB official Yuri Kolesnikov told reporter Michael Chapman of Human Events. They weren't Soviet agents, Kolesnikov said. But they "gave us information about the atom bomb," first because they were fearful that Hitler might defeat the Soviet Union in World War II and later because "Oppenheimer and the other scientists wanted to create a balance of power between the United States, which had the bomb, and the USSR, which didn't."[258] "Oppenheimer was not a Soviet agent like Fuchs," the museum's director told Chapman. "But, yes, he did cooperate with Soviet intelligence. That's why his picture is here."[259]

According to Haynes and Klehr, "Throughout his life Oppenheimer declined to provide a detailed or accurate accounting of his relationship with the CPUSA in the late 1930s and early 1940s and of his knowledge of Communists who worked on the Manhattan Project."[260]

↑Stephen Schwartz, "Communists and Islamic Extremists - Then and Now," FrontPageMagazine.com, July 8, 2002. A 1951 investigation by HUAC, then chaired by Democrat John Stephens Wood, concluded that Pauling was "primarily engrossed in placing his scientific attainments at the service of a host of organizations which have in common their complete subservience to the Communist Party, USA, and the Soviet Union. Professor Pauling has not deviated a hair's breadth from this pattern of loyalty to the Communist cause since 1946." (House Committee on Un-American Activities, Report on the Communist "Peace" Offensive, the Attempt to Disarm and Defeat America [Washington DC: US Government Printing Office, 1951], p. 86) In 1970, the Soviet government would reward Pauling for his long service with the Lenin prize.

↑"Filling in a security questionnaire, Oppie had lately admitted that he had been 'a member of just about every Communist-front organization on the West Coast'..." Peter Wyden, Day One: Before Hiroshima and After (Simon and Schuster, 1984) ISBN 0671461427, p. 49. Cf. "As Oppenheimer was to write on a 1942 security questionnaire... : '...I have been a member of just about every Communist Front organization on the West Coast.'" Rachel Teukolsky, "Regarding Scientist X," Berkeley Science Review, Issue 1 (Spring 2001), p. 17; "When he joined the atomic bomb project he admitted in his security questionnaire that he had been 'a member of just about every Communist Front organization on the West Coast.'" J. Robert Oppenheimer, (1904 - 1967), "Race for the Superbomb," American Experience, PBS

↑According to the FBI, he was subscribed as early as 1938. (CINRAD: 227 [PDF 236]) Asked if his subscription expired after he joined the Manhattan Project, Oppenheimer said: "Since I don't know when it was, I can't answer that question." He admitted, "I think I paid for it" and "I don't believe I canceled the subscription." AEC Hearing: 157 (PDF 167)

↑Under threat of being listed by HUAC in the wake of the Nazi-Soviet pact, the ACLU purged any "member of any political organization which supports totalitarian dictatorship in any country, or who by his public declaration and connections indicates his support of such a principle" (including future CPUSA Chairman Elizabeth Gurley Flynn) from its Executive Committee in 1940, although its continued front activity caused it to be listed as a Communist front by a joint committee of the California Legislature in 1943: “The American Civil Liberties Union may be definitely classed as a Communist front or ‘transmission belt’ organization.” Communist Front Organizations, Fourth Report of the Senate Fact-Finding Committee On Un-American Activities, California Legislature, 1948, p. 107 (PDF p. 117)

↑Oppenheimer was listed as a donor to this organization in People's World, January 29, 1938, cited in CINRAD: 227 (PDF p. 236)

↑Huron was identified in the Gorsky memo in 1948 by Anatoly Gorsky (NKVD rezident in Washington in 1945) as Byron T. Darling, who would be fired from a post as associate professor of physics at Ohio State University in 1953 when he refused to answer a question about his Communist Party ties before HUAC.

↑Less that four months before, this very hotel was the scene of FBI surveillance recording State Department official John Stewart Service handing off "a document which dealt with matters the Chinese had furnished to the United States government in confidence" (Report of the United States Senate Subcommittee on the Investigation of Loyalty of State Department Employees, 1950, Vol. 2, appendix, p. 2051) to the secret CommunistPhilip Jaffe. Philip Jaffe, The Amerasia Case from 1945 to the Present (New York: Philip J. Jaffe, 1979), p. 1

↑Senator Harley M. Kilgore (D-WV) accused U.S. "military government officials" in occupied Germany of putting "our national security and the security of our allies... in jeopardy" for "private and selfish ends," due to "their connections with industrial and financial enterprises which had close pre-war ties with the Nazis." Howard Watson Armbruster, Treason's Peace: German Dyes & American Dupes (New York: Beechhurst Press, 1947), p. 401